Crackling sound - and a Workaround!

[Groovacious]

This is fun:

On stage with a major performer in the US, I had routed my guitar through Ableton 8.4 (Mac Powerbook Os 10.6.8, 4Gig RAM) since the latency, set at 120 buffer setting, was workable....

I had put a track into constant input monitoring to utilize the fast EQ's and compressions along with my reverb of choice, Tone2k's WARM VERB which gave me a truly unbelievable sound that had all engineers FOH and monitoring, stop by and investigate what I was doing.

Guitar cable went into line input. perfect levels are present.

We are starting a new song after having the laptop rest for a few tunes where I was working another instrument and all of a sudden the audio throughput crackles and sounds so bad that the artist had to stop the show and prompted me to fix the issue at hand.

THANK GOD the next day, back in the hotel, I was instantly able to duplicate the problem and thought a higher buffer setting would save the day" wrong!

During soundcheck I noticed that all of a sudden the latency had more than TRIPLED!

Discovered an instinctive work-around: Starting and stopping playback for just a fraction of a second totally 100 % fixed the problem - and it stayed that way - for a few minutes.
Then I have to do it again to keep Ableton from messing with things....

It feels like this is a hard drive issue (sleep mode) or whatever but it is in the domain of Ableton.
There is no software that acts like this on my laptop - or desktop, for that matter. DP is Rock Solid !!

Tomorrow (next show) I will reset the buffer to a nice and tight setting around 80 or 90 and try again to do my workaround during the show - it just sounds too good for me to give up now.

Do I need the extra stress? You guessed right: Hell no!

But how awesome is it that I can use Live as a play thru device with great processing and wonderful FX - it just surprises the heck out of everybody on deck !


You know what I'm talking about? Let's hear your experience...please...!

Stephan Oberhoff
03/09/13

[chapelier fou]

You should post your computer's specs and what soundcard you're using...

[Groovacious]

@chapelier fou:

you are sure you read my post?
Info about the computer is there !

Good night and thanks
Stephan

[MarksBasementRecords.com]

Neat! I guess Live is living up to its name.

I use effects live on my drums sometimes

[nemoy]

Live for drums? How did you do that?

I tried that several times, But the Latency was unbearable.
(2010 Macbook Pro with an RME Fireface 400), an eventhough
the buffersize is down to 96 samples(!), I got 100 to 130 ms latency.
(only on audio Channels, midi is spot on!)
This is annoying.

Even a completely empty Set, with only 1 Audiochannel, no FX,
nothing! -> 100ms Delay

The Driver Latency compensation didn't do ANYthing, and so
did the Track offset.
I had to give up on this one... Maybe i'll try again with Live 9...

[dckyoto]

We jam every day live using Ableton Live for effects in real-time, it works great apart from the occasional crackle (which might not be Ableton in our case but something to do with the word-clock on our input devices, we're still investigating).

To make it work with minimal enough latency to actually make good music (ie. <10ms latency) we use a UA Apollo quad (2ms) and an Octopre mkii (light-piped to the quad) which gives us 18 inputs, all of which can have effects applied to them in Live as long as the CPU usage doesn't go *too* high.

It's a retina macbook with SSD drives and a thunderbolt connection to the apollo.